The present disclosure generally relates to depth sensing, and specifically relates to depth determination using polarization of light and a camera assembly with augmented pixels each having multiple gates and local storage locations.
To achieve compelling user experience in artificial reality systems, it is essential to rely on an accurate and efficient camera for sensing a three-dimensional (3D) surrounding environment. However, it is challenging to design a depth camera having a high performance and low computational power, which is also robust to the environment, flexible to operate, and have a compact form factor. Moreover, conventional methods for depth sensing typically involve either a triangulation or time of flight based depth determination, and have several drawbacks. For example, the triangulation based methods generally have a high computational cost to generate a depth map that involves rectification and searching for corresponding points using a pair of stereo images. The depth resolution achieved with the triangulation-based methods also relies on a baseline (e.g., distance between source and camera), and a size of the baseline increases with increasing depth. The time-of-flight methods for depth sensing experience a limited lateral resolution due to a limited number of pixels in conventional sensors.